How to get original unit?

[spiroski]

How can I get the original unit of an instance?

[triplepoint]

That's a good question; there's currently no way to get just the original unit back out. I think the best you can get is to cast a PhysicalQuantity object to a string, and then break on the space, like so (untested):

$height = new Length(6.16, 'feet');
list($original_value, $original_unit) = explode(' ', (string) $height);
echo $original_unit;  // This is what you're looking for

Please note that this strategy will return the canonical name of the original unit, not the particular alias you might've actually passed into the constructor. So for instance if you created a Mass object with new Mass(2, 'pounds');, the $original_unit value will be lbs.

But it does seem like there should be a more direct way to fetch the original value and the original unit. That's probably worth adding.

Does that help?

[marcortola]

How about adding a getter method in the AbstractPhysicalQuantity class?

[amenk]

Same is for originalValue -> currently there are no getters for this. Should we just make a PR?